Obtaining a copyright for music I plan to release for free

My band is going to be releasing an album in about a month, and we want to distribute it for free. Now, I do still want to protect the music from being taken, reproduced, and sold under another name. Would a "poor man's copyright" be enough for this (IE, email & snail mail the music to myself)? You understand that I do not want to spend a terrific amount of money, since... well... it would be rather impossible to turn a profit! What would you recommend as a course of action?

These days, I have mixed feelings about this copyright subject. In days gone by, it meant something. Today, with the proliferation of content being developed, no one is creating anything new. So whatever you have created, can be stolen, copyrighted or not. And copyrights are cheap to file for. But as I have indicated to people, think about phone numbers. Phone numbers are similar to melodic themes. After a while, you run out of usable numbers and they begin to repeat. So anything that could be created has been created already. If some rich fella wanted to rip-you-off, all they need do is steal your concept. Invert the melody. Modify the lyrics. And you're screwed. You got big bucks for a big-time entertainment lawyer? I think not. So don't worry your little head off. Especially if you are going to release it to the world at large. This way, if somebody steals your material, he is contact them and ask them for free tickets to their concert. VIP tickets that is. Then you can ask them if they'd like you to write something else for them? For a fee this time of course.

Well to tell you the truth, as long as they gave us a heads up I'd be all for people "remixing" our music.

And if you've heard our music (which you have - two songs I believe) it's not something you can really "steal." You could try to extract basic concepts, but at that point I PERSONALLY wouldn't even recognise it as the same song, and therefore would not really care. At all.

So... I suppose I'll just mail it to myself. Besides, who would steal our music? It's not like it's marketable or something.

All musical ideas have not been done before. People naturally like to emulate what they have heard before, it makes us feel closer to "home". But new ideas and sounds are slowly happening all the time.

Look what we can do with binary, which is just two states, 1 or 0. The language of music is complex when compared to binary.

To think it has been done before only does one thing, it puts limits on human imagination.

Ahhh. Most copyrighted thematics are within 7 consecutive notes. It wouldn't matter if you went up or down as many octaves as you wanted as it could still be recognizable. Remember "MY SWEET LORD"? The guy who won his lawsuit, song, never even sounded like George's piece. So how do you account for that? It's not necessarily mathematical. It's subjective jurisprudence. And then you are stoned to death.

Just heard Judy Gold on TV say stoned when I wrote stoned. Great minds think alike.